Good and Gone

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  Clay’s snore gets louder. An old man kind of a snore. Then he mumbles, “Sorry,” and rolls over.

  And after. After.

  BEFORE

  November

  Seth weighed twenty-seven pounds more than me. It wasn’t that much. A small dog could weigh twenty-seven pounds. A big cat. And yet, when his body was on top of mine, it felt like a pickup truck stacked with dumbbells parked on me. All my breath went out. He sucked it up like a vampire.

  And I thought: this is what happened to Remy Yoo.

  And I thought: this is what happens to me.

  “No,” I said. I put my hands on his shoulders. They were bare and cold and smooth as bowling balls.

  He kissed me.

  Did I like these kisses once? I used to think I could kiss him for hours, till my lips were raw. Now the rest of me felt raw as an open sore. These kisses were a threat.

  “No,” I said again.

  “What?” he asked, breathy in my ear.

  “I said, no. I don’t want to do this today.”

  He sighed and rolled over. “Are you trying to make me woo you or something? Beg you? I didn’t think you were so manipulative.”

  “I’m not—”

  “So needy.”

  “I’m not needy.”

  Red rage. Where were you all this time?

  “So what do I need to do to get past this?” His hand was around my wrist and he rubbed his thumb against my skin, right over my thick, blue vein. His eyes. Those eyes. They were kind.

  I frowned. “I just— I think we should take a step back. Like, back before sex.”

  “You can’t rewind like that.”

  “I’m not talking about rewinding. More like starting again.”

  “We’ve barely been together three months. What’s to start over?”

  “Us. Physically, I mean.”

  He sighed. “I didn’t think you were like this.”

  “What did you think I was like?”

  I wanted to hear this. I wanted to hear how he saw me.

  “I thought the crying was just the way you were. Some girls are like that. Emotional.”

  “I’m not emotional.” But as I said it, my voice rose in pitch, and he smirked. I pulled my wrist free.

  “I was crying because I didn’t want to—not really.”

  “You either do or you don’t. And you never said no.”

  “I did. I said, ‘No, thank you.’”

  He chuckled. “That’s what girls say. Like you offer them some cake or pie or whatever, and they say, ‘No, thank you,’ because girls aren’t supposed to show an appetite. But you offer it to them again, and they take it. They take it because they want it, but they had to put up a show of not wanting it.”

  “Well, I didn’t really want this. Not yet.”

  “Shit, Lexi, I knew you were young, but . . .” He couldn’t even finish. He shook his head. “We did it more than once.”

  “I never wanted it, though. I just held still.”

  “And I’m supposed to know what that means?”

  “I should have said it more clearly.” But I didn’t feel the words as I said them. I said them as a way to move the conversation along. To move away.

  “Yes, you should have.” He sat up and tugged his shirt and sweater back on. His hair was mussed around his eyes and I wanted to reach up and brush it away. “So I guess this is it.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “We’re done.”

  “No, that’s not what I wanted. We could still—”

  “I’ll see you around, Lexi,” he said as he pulled his jeans back on, tight against his skin.

  And then he left me alone in his bedroom. I had to pull my clothes back on and walk down the stairs. His mom was in the kitchen working on a laptop. She didn’t even look up as I walked by.

  I let myself out of the house. I was 4.7 miles away from home, 24,816 feet. I knew this because I had looked it up. I had wanted to know if I could count that high and bring him to me like an incantation. Now I just knew it meant that I was too many steps away from home and I couldn’t call my parents because I didn’t know how to explain this to them. The only person I had to call was Charlie.

  He didn’t pick up the first time. It went to his voicemail. So I called again. That was the universal sign for this is urgent. But he didn’t pick up again. I texted him: I am going to call one more time and you’d better pick up. Or else. Then I dialed one more time.

  “What?” he answered.

  “I need a ride.”

  “Not a taxi service.”

  Really? I thought. Because it’s not like you’re doing anything else.

  “I’m at Seth’s and I need a ride home.”

  “Why can’t he drive you?”

  “He just can’t.”

  There was silence on the line. The kind of silence where you wondered if the call had been dropped.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not? It’s Saturday. You don’t have class. What are you doing that’s so pressing?”

  “I just can’t, okay, Lexi?”

  “Well fuck you very much.”

  I hung up and started walking.

  NOW

  I stomp my feet. My sneakers are stiff and still a little wet. It feels like they are freezing around my feet. Maybe they will freeze to my feet and I’ll be the frozen-sneakered girl for the rest of my days.

  Snow crunches behind me. I look over my shoulder and there is Zack picking over the snow in tiny steps, his hands held out to the side like he’s a tightrope walker. He slides a little, but catches himself. “Kind of treacherous out here,” he says.

  “Kind of treacherous everywhere,” I reply.

  He slides his feet over the snow until he’s right up beside me. “So,” he says. And then he coughs and claps his hands together. He coughs again. It’s like he expects me to say something, but I came out here to be alone, to get out of that stuffy cabin with all those boys and their boy smells and boy noises.

  “So,” he says again. “Um.”

  There is a big black hole in the lake where I crashed through, but the rest of it is white and smooth.

  “I heard you guys talking in there—”

  I keep looking out at the snow. The moon hits it and makes it glitter. It’s like a scene in a painting. So still and perfect. Except for that big black hole.

  “It’s just that—” he tries again.

  “Yeah?” I sigh.

  “I heard you guys.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Come on, Lexi. I’m having a hard time finding an appropriate entry point here.”

  “So did he,” I say. I mime hitting a rim shot and say, “Bah dum dum.”

  “Don’t do that,” he tells me.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Make a joke about it.” He kicks the snow.

  “No, don’t you do that. Don’t tell me how to feel and what I can joke about. Don’t tell me how to deal with what happened to me. If I want to make a joke about it, then I’ll make a fucking joke about it.”

  “Okay, okay.” He holds up both his hands, but it doesn’t look like surrender. It looks like appeasement. And I hate him for that. I start to march away. Right toward the water.

  “Lexi!”

  “Stop following me.”

  “Stop going toward the water.”

  “I’m not going back in.” But maybe I will. Because it was nice down there. Slipping below had been like going into some other world. The old vines swirled and I could almost believe in little lake sprites living down there. A peaceful world under the surface with fern fairies and maybe even a nice little home for me.

  “Lexi!” he says again. His boots stop. So I stop, too.

  We don’t move. Nothing moves. Not the trees or the moon or the snow on the lake.

  “I never said it out loud before,” I tell him. “Or in my head. I never called it what it was. But that is what it was, right?”

  “Ye
s, I think so.” He moves slowly toward me. “It’s a hard word to say, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I agree. But then I yell it out over the lake. “Rape, rape, rape, rape, rape,” over and over and louder and louder. Out over the gaping black hole and the smooth ice. Out past the trees that are bent down with snow and look like little gnome houses. I half expect angry gnomes to come crawling out, to raise their fists at me. That’s what this place feels like. Like a gingerbread village. Not real. Not permanent.

  “I bet you think I’m stupid for staying with him,” I say.

  “No,” he tells me. I want to believe him. He scratches his head through a wool cap he found somewhere.

  “I am stupid. He did it over and over and I just stayed with him. Like maybe he would stop or maybe I would actually start to like it or want it or something.”

  He scratches his head again. “Lexi, I am so out of my depth here. I have no idea what the right thing to say is. But this is what I know. He’s an asshole and you’re not stupid and I’m just sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for?”

  “That it happened. I’m sure you don’t want people to feel sorry for you, but—”

  “Maybe you should be sorry.”

  “What?” He blinks at me. His stubby little lashes hit his bright pink cheeks.

  “I sometimes think if one little thing had been different, everything else would be different, too. Like if you had driven me to school, maybe I would’ve met one of your dorky friends and wound up with him instead of Seth.”

  “You wanted me to drive you to school?”

  “Of course I wanted you to drive me to school, dumbass. Who wants to ride the bus? Gwen said it would’ve raised my stock. I don’t know about that, but it would’ve been different.”

  “You really think none of this would’ve happened if I drove you to school?” His voice cracks.

  “No, of course not. It happened because of me.”

  “It happened because of Seth.”

  I shrug. I know he’s right, but I can’t feel that. I mean, I ache like nothing I have ever ached for before to be filled with righteous anger at Seth. To not blame myself. To not feel small and ugly, but to let that anger fill me up so I rise up like some kind of comic book superhero in thigh-high boots and a bustier and just rain down vengeance on Seth. But I can’t muster that. All I can manage is self-loathing and sarcasm. Which makes me hate myself even more. It’s this bitter circle, and all I want is to break it but it gets tighter and tighter and tighter until I can’t breathe.

  “Listen,” he says. I hate when people start a sentence with “Listen.” They do it because they know you don’t want to hear what comes next. “You have every right to be angry at everyone and everything.”

  “Thank you for that permission.”

  He grimaces. “But Charlie—I mean some people are depressed because of a thing that happens to them. But for some people, it’s chemical—the thing that happens is inside them.”

  “Are you really trying to get me to feel bad for Charlie right now?”

  “You must feel a little bad or something or else you wouldn’t have come on this trip.”

  He’s right, I guess. “I thought something had happened to him, too. Something with Penelope. Something so awful I couldn’t even imagine it.”

  “It’s not always so cause and effect. Like my mom, she’s been dealing with this for years. Probably her whole life, I guess. Different diets and like weird exercise programs that are supposed to help her and crystals. She goes on meds, but she says they are calcifying her insides—”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Well, sure, but it’s not exactly logic at work. And anyway, my dad has had enough of it. Of watching her not do what she needs to do. And so they argue all the time. But it’s not about her or anything like that. It’s about where to keep the trash bags or whether they should get a new snowblower or where I should go to college. And they never talk about the real problem. But here’s the weird thing: my mom is doing better. Like, it seems the more they fight, the better she does. It should be sending her into a spiral.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “Well, no, it’s not good because it’s not sustainable. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. I’m just saying that it’s not like there’s always a clear line between something happening and someone being depressed.”

  “What do you mean it’s not sustainable?”

  “They can’t keep fighting forever. My dad is going to file for divorce any day now. I can see it even if he can’t.”

  “That’s messed up. She needs him.”

  “To fight with her? That’s even more messed up.” He pulls the cap down over his ears. “I’ll be thankful when it’s all done, to be honest. But what I’m trying to say to you is to maybe cut Charlie some slack.”

  “No,” I tell him. Because if there is someone I can feel righteous anger toward, it’s Charlie. He should have come when I called him. That’s what brothers are supposed to do. I bet Clay would come no questions asked from half a world away to help Ari. If he was stuck on a deserted island and he somehow sensed that Ari was in trouble he would build a boat out of banana leaves and the trunk of a coconut tree and he would sail over weeks and months and miles to get back to her to save her. Plus make sure she didn’t drink or become a stripper. That’s what brothers are supposed to do for you. I could’ve stepped out onstage at Sherri’s, and Charlie wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.

  Zack nods and stomps his feet on the ground. I look out at the big, black hole in the lake. So does Zack. He doesn’t remind me that Charlie dove in to get me. That he showed up when it mattered. But here’s the thing: I’m still not sure if Charlie went in to get me out, or to go down with me.

  In the morning Clay sits up and the first thing he does is pull on his boots. The space on the other side of me is empty. “Where’s Charlie?”

  “Downstairs,” Clay replies without looking at me. “He’s trying to figure out something for breakfast. You know, you’d think if your best friend works at a grocery store you’d never be hungry, but he’s a stingy bastard.”

  “I’m not,” Gabe says. He stretches his arms above his head. Muscles ripple. I’m not even joking. Like something out of a men’s health magazine. The curls on the back of his head stand up like a cloud.

  “Seriously,” I say. “Angel.”

  Clay scowls. “If you only knew.”

  But Ari nods.

  “Well, sure, no one is really an angel,” I say. “Not all the way through.”

  “So maybe the more on top, the less deep it goes,” Clay says.

  “And screw you, too,” Gabe says as he tugs a shirt on.

  Clay stands up. He holds a hand down to me and helps me to my feet. It’s weird, though, because even as he’s reaching out his hand to me, he’s still not looking me in the eye.

  We walk down the stairs to the main part of the dining hall. Charlie is banging plastic bowls down on a pine table. I head toward him, then see my dingy beige bra hanging on the back of a chair by the fireplace. I snag it and tuck it under my shirt, then retreat past the guys. I tuck into a nook and slip it on under my shirt.

  Gabe and Ari are sitting at the table when I get back. Through the open window to the kitchen I see Clay and Charlie working over the stove. Charlie’s back is hunched, his shoulders tight together.

  “They’re making oatmeal,” Gabe says. “I told them to look for mealy moths.”

  “Eh, it’s a little protein.”

  Gabe looks up through sleepy eyelashes. “Aren’t you all glass half-full.”

  “About as much as you’re an angel, it would seem.”

  Arabella watches our conversation.

  He rubs the heel of his hand against his forehead. “So you’re a fan of Adrian Wildes?”

  “No.”

  “Not at all?” Arabella asks. “Why are you here, then?”

  “It was Charlie’s idea. I don’t even know
what it’s all about. I mean, I didn’t even realize he liked Adrian Wildes that much. But whatever.”

  “And you just got in the car with him.”

  “Everyone is expecting me to jump in the lake, but he’s the one that needs watching, not that he has any good reason for it.”

  “There’s a good reason to kill yourself?”

  “No one’s killing themselves,” Clay says as he sets a pot of oatmeal down on the table.

  “It’s going to leave a mark,” Gabe says.

  “Whoop dee do. Charlie’s trying to find coffee so we can all be personable.”

  “Good.”

  “Should I wake Zack up?” I ask.

  “Let him sleep,” Clay says. “All he has to wake up to is snow and pushing cars out of it.”

  “So you’re saying let him stay in dreamland a little longer.”

  “I guess that’s what we’d all want, isn’t it?”

  Clayton shows me the storage room with all the clothes in it and I layer another pair of sweatpants and two sweatshirts on top of what I’m already wearing. I find some socks, too, white tube socks with red stripes at the top. My shoes have dried, but are stiff and crusty.

  “You look like the Michelin tire man,” Clay says.

  I have both hoods pulled up, the bottom one pulled tight so that it covers the outer ring of my face. “I was going for more of a futuristic Little Red Riding Hood.”

  He says, “Sure, okay,” as he shoves his hands into the pockets of his coat. He turns away from me.

  “How big is the scar?” I ask.

  “A good three inches.”

  “Better than a bad three inches.”

  He smiles and his face relaxes for the first time. It’s a funny sort of a face. His nose is flat, his eyes deep set and piercing blue with stubby lashes. He has a crooked scar on his cheek and another one above his eye. That makes three scars, at least.

  But then his face goes right back to looking like a snowman melting drop by drop. And I know. He heard.

  “You were listening last night. To me and my brother.”

  He turns toward the floor.

  “You didn’t say anything. You just eavesdropped and fake snored.”

  “I was trying to remind you that I was there without making you think I was listening.”